The disclosure generally relates to social networking, and more specifically to associating a location with social networking content.
Social networking systems have become prevalent in recent years because they provide a useful environment in which users can connect to and communicate with other users. A variety of different types of social networking systems exist that provide mechanisms allowing users to interact within their social networks. In this context, a user may be an individual or any other entity, such as a business or other non-person entity. Accordingly, while enabling social communications among friends, a social networking system can also be a valuable tool for businesses to engage with potential consumers.
Additionally, social networking systems enable users to interact with other users or objects by performing various actions. For example, users may post comments to pages associated with other users, view images, view video, listen to audio data or perform other actions on various objects maintained by the social networking system. Associating a location with user content posted to the social networking system improves interactions between social networking system users. For example, associating a location with a status update or photograph provides additional context about the status update or photograph to other users. However, allowing users to freely label content with a user-defined tag may create inconsistencies between various content. For example, different users may use different names to identify the same location, making it difficult for users to correlate content with locations.
However, many locations have similar or identical names, which may require users to identify a location from a list of multiple possible locations from the location query engine. For example, if a user attempts to associate a picture with a name or identifier having multiple locations, such as a chain restaurant, a location query engine may return a listing of various chain restaurant locations, causing the user to navigate through several options and to know additional information about, such as its current location. While some devices, such as smartphones, include a global positioning system (GPS) to identify a location, users may desire to associate content with a location different than their current location or may provide content to the social networking system from a device that does not include a GPS.